December 11, 2005
Editorial - The New York Times
Death of an American City
We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.
We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.
There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.
At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.
The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.
The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.
Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?
Losing a major American city.
"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.
Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.
The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.
Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.
If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.
Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
A Week at Warp Speed
Whew !
Since last I posted here (the Friday after Thanksgiving), eleven days have passed ! That is the longest I have gone so far without a personal post - and the reason is simple enough: so many things have happened.
Here is an abbreviated account:
My last post was about anticipation, because my eleven-year-old son Christopher was going to be visiting the next day for a couple of days (he lives in another state with his mother) and it had been awhile since our last visit.
That visit was fabulous, and I will have a special post about it within the next week.
THEN there was three days of frenetic activity as my "FrAussie" sister JC and her children MC and HA wrapped up their three-week visit to the states with a pair of birthday celebrations (each child turned a new age while here) and last-minute visits with family and friends.
THEN I was fortunate enough to be accompanying those three FrAussies to Los Angeles and Disneyland for a day before helping send them on their merry way back to Oz late Friday evening ! There will be an entire post devoted to this visit soon !
Whew !
More later !
Since last I posted here (the Friday after Thanksgiving), eleven days have passed ! That is the longest I have gone so far without a personal post - and the reason is simple enough: so many things have happened.
Here is an abbreviated account:
My last post was about anticipation, because my eleven-year-old son Christopher was going to be visiting the next day for a couple of days (he lives in another state with his mother) and it had been awhile since our last visit.
That visit was fabulous, and I will have a special post about it within the next week.
THEN there was three days of frenetic activity as my "FrAussie" sister JC and her children MC and HA wrapped up their three-week visit to the states with a pair of birthday celebrations (each child turned a new age while here) and last-minute visits with family and friends.
THEN I was fortunate enough to be accompanying those three FrAussies to Los Angeles and Disneyland for a day before helping send them on their merry way back to Oz late Friday evening ! There will be an entire post devoted to this visit soon !
Whew !
More later !
Friday, November 25, 2005
Anticipation
Anticipation.
There's magic there.
There's danger there.
There's the gamut of emotions, from anxiousness to hope to fear to joy to confusion to exuberance to anger to satisfaction to disappointment.
It's both energizing AND exhausting.
It fills our life's waiting moments, when we are looking forward to something happening or not happening, like so many rain drops seek and find each nook and cranny in a flower bed, an old barn, an unprotected body walking briskly.
It leads to soaring high and dipping low.
It is never neutral.
It accompanies each plan as it's createad, each step toward the realization of that plan, and each moment we think about that plan.
It can rise with the incredible speed of light, for that's how fast a thpought travels inside our brain.
It can be deflated with equal dispatch, for that's the speed of a hope dashed.
It can enlarge our hearts, sharpen our vision, increase our appetities, and sensitize our souls.
It's heuristic - leading us to further exploration.
Mostly, it's omnipresent, and must be dealt with or else.
Or else miss out on one of the most delicious life experiences.
###
There's magic there.
There's danger there.
There's the gamut of emotions, from anxiousness to hope to fear to joy to confusion to exuberance to anger to satisfaction to disappointment.
It's both energizing AND exhausting.
It fills our life's waiting moments, when we are looking forward to something happening or not happening, like so many rain drops seek and find each nook and cranny in a flower bed, an old barn, an unprotected body walking briskly.
It leads to soaring high and dipping low.
It is never neutral.
It accompanies each plan as it's createad, each step toward the realization of that plan, and each moment we think about that plan.
It can rise with the incredible speed of light, for that's how fast a thpought travels inside our brain.
It can be deflated with equal dispatch, for that's the speed of a hope dashed.
It can enlarge our hearts, sharpen our vision, increase our appetities, and sensitize our souls.
It's heuristic - leading us to further exploration.
Mostly, it's omnipresent, and must be dealt with or else.
Or else miss out on one of the most delicious life experiences.
###
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Living a Thankful Life
Thanksgiving.
Nice name for a holiday. But a far, far better name for a lifestyle.
There are so many people, feelings, ideas, events, places, and other things for which to be thankful that to name even a few means leaving out more than can be included.
Many folks in my home area of Louisiana will be happy to see 2005 come to an end, and are struggling in one way or another right now with the effects of the two category five hurricanes.
Those twisted sisters, Katrina and Rita, cut paths of destruction, devastation, and turmoil and even now continue to weigh heavily on those affected.
So I understand this year's ambivalence many of my fellow Cajuns and New Orleanians and Louisianians feel toward celebrating "Thanksgiving."
Normally, we are an exuberant and resilient people who are known world-wide for our "joie de vie" (love of life) and "savoie faire" (skill at living life) - as evidenced in our famous celebrations - from deep winter's Mardi Gras to Spring's Jazz Fest to summer's lazy days at a beach to fall's full festival season in the rural parishes (counties).
I am giving thanks today mostly for my Dieu-donne {pronounced d'YOOH daw NAY - "God-given"} disposition.
Ever since I can remember, I have felt optimisitc about things, and that did not change with the coming of the hurricanes this year - or with the death of my mother only three weeks prior (on Aug 6th).
New Orleans now has an opportunity it might never have had to remake itself, literally from the ground up.
And each of us who live here have a similar chance to remake ourselves too, from the soul out. We need to become experts at living fully again.
"How do you become an expert," I once asked my Uncle Mose.
"To become an expert," he said wryly, "you have to make 5,000 mistakes.
"Get busy."
###
Nice name for a holiday. But a far, far better name for a lifestyle.
There are so many people, feelings, ideas, events, places, and other things for which to be thankful that to name even a few means leaving out more than can be included.
Many folks in my home area of Louisiana will be happy to see 2005 come to an end, and are struggling in one way or another right now with the effects of the two category five hurricanes.
Those twisted sisters, Katrina and Rita, cut paths of destruction, devastation, and turmoil and even now continue to weigh heavily on those affected.
So I understand this year's ambivalence many of my fellow Cajuns and New Orleanians and Louisianians feel toward celebrating "Thanksgiving."
Normally, we are an exuberant and resilient people who are known world-wide for our "joie de vie" (love of life) and "savoie faire" (skill at living life) - as evidenced in our famous celebrations - from deep winter's Mardi Gras to Spring's Jazz Fest to summer's lazy days at a beach to fall's full festival season in the rural parishes (counties).
I am giving thanks today mostly for my Dieu-donne {pronounced d'YOOH daw NAY - "God-given"} disposition.
Ever since I can remember, I have felt optimisitc about things, and that did not change with the coming of the hurricanes this year - or with the death of my mother only three weeks prior (on Aug 6th).
New Orleans now has an opportunity it might never have had to remake itself, literally from the ground up.
And each of us who live here have a similar chance to remake ourselves too, from the soul out. We need to become experts at living fully again.
"How do you become an expert," I once asked my Uncle Mose.
"To become an expert," he said wryly, "you have to make 5,000 mistakes.
"Get busy."
###
Monday, November 21, 2005
A "Master Gardener"
Tonight I completed all the course work in order to be certified a "Master Gardener" by Louisiana State University (LSU). But in my heart and mind - my maternal grandfather Joseph Essie Bernard ("Acie") will always and for evermore be the only genuine "Master Gardener" in our family. Lucky for me he lived just across the street as I grew up. More about him on another day.
Our class had been meeting each Monday for the past several months - and we all have one more meeting to attend (though it's not a class - just a final meeting) and some volunteer work to do before we are certified, but it has been one of the most enlightening semesters of study in my life.
I will add more to this entry later (as in days later) - so check back if you are interested in this topic.
I just wanted to mark this day in some way, so wrote this after returning from my final class. I feel like Johnny Appleseed must have felt when he started out walking across America : full of hope and big ideas and enthusiasm and the desire to plant things and help teach others to do the same.
I already know that my specialty and focus will be Organic Gardening.
I love not only the results of OG, but also - and more importantly i feel - the whole lifestyle and spiritual side of OG.
I already feel empowered by this semester's work and study, and hope to be sowing my new-found knowledge, enthusiasm, and desire in as many fertile locations as I can find - be that actual gardening beds or people's minds and hearts and souls .
Have hope, will travel !
Sunday, November 20, 2005
The Spoken Word
The thin line between being glib and being profound is often not appreciated by those claiming to speak "the truth." This beautifully-written column describes this phenomenon. Enjoy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2005
Lives
The Unwhole Truth
By LYDIA MILLET
It was during a winter of long, dreary parties to which the same people came week after week. My best friend and my boyfriend and I went to the parties hoping there would be new people, but there were always only the old people. And always, when I saw them again, my heart would sink at the realization that this party would be a thankless repetition of the last party, at which nothing of note occurred.
Passing in a crowded kitchen, these other guests and I would lift our drinks and grimace painfully, recalling how little we had to say to one another. I kept busy by pretending I had goals; I made a vector of purpose as I crossed a room, to discourage unwanted conversational sallies.
We stood in corners in an invisible fortress, my best friend, my boyfriend and I. The three of us had strong opinions and we had high standards - standards we ourselves rarely met.
"There are those analytical philosophers again," I might say, nodding at a group of three nebbish grad students at the window. "From that housewarming in Cobble Hill."
"Philosophers," my best friend would muse. "Were they even smart?"
My boyfriend shook his head grimly. "Actually, quite stupid."
Not that we meant to be snide. We meant to be honest. In a fallen world, a world of dire futures and world leaders less educated than bridge builders, one thing we could do for ourselves was be honest. We found solidarity in judgment.
Finally my friend started seeing someone, and the routine of dull, sarcastic weekends was broken. The new man was kind and did not feel the need to build invisible fortresses. It was the end of an era, and I suspect we were all privately glad.
And then one night my friend called me in tears. Her new boyfriend had suddenly ended it. Could I come to see her? Of course, I said, and went out into the cold with a bottle of wine.
I found her alone in her apartment, sobbing. We sat on the couch and wrapped blankets around ourselves and I alternated between patting her blanketed knee and rubbing her shoulder, in the awkward way people have when they know a comforting touch is called for but are feeling self-conscious.
"I just don't understand," said my friend, again and again. "It really seemed good."
I would pat more on the knee or the arm and try to say something different from what I said five minutes earlier. I wanted her to feel comforted; I wanted her to feel that the new and now-ex-boyfriend was wrong and more than that unworthy, and that I was the ambassador from the rest of the world, there to illuminate this for her with startling clarity.
As the evening wore on, we drank more wine and began to speak in generalities, getting in a few jabs at the new and now-ex-boyfriend; and finally there came a moment when she looked placid, if not exactly cheerful.
"I know it'll be fine eventually," she said softly. "I just don't feel like being by myself right now."
"Well," I said, leaning forward with what I imagine was a sage, world-weary face - rather premature since I was 26 - "think of it as a rehearsal. I mean, really, we all die alone."
She stared at me and started to cry again.
On the subway headed home I felt a sense of shame. I realized I had long clung to a simple axiom: say what comes into your head, for this is called honesty. Honesty was good; and if we were honest and therefore good, others would be good, too, and out of this honest conversation a miraculous truth would arise. But here I was, ashamed, alone and full of cheap wine and gazing at an ad for Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, scourge of pimples throughout the five boroughs. It occurred to me for the first time that truth was not the same as impulse.
This recognition was real but initially fleeting. Later my friend ribbed me for what I'd said. When her ribbing irked me, I retorted: "Well, it's true, isn't it? I mean, we all do die alone."
She shook her head and smiled. "Honey," she said, "true has nothing to do with it."
She said this with her usual calm forbearance, but in the turn of an instant I went away from youth. Being young I had needed judgment to make myself distinct; because honesty was the way to judgment, I said whatever came to me, thinking the speed and plenty of my words made them true. I'd confused honesty with expedience.
And the way to the future was illuminated. From now on the task would no longer be separation and difference, no longer the sculpturing of a self to be distinct from other selves. From now on the task would be to find happiness in a crowd.
Lydia Millet is the author of several novels. Her most recent is "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2005
Lives
The Unwhole Truth
By LYDIA MILLET
It was during a winter of long, dreary parties to which the same people came week after week. My best friend and my boyfriend and I went to the parties hoping there would be new people, but there were always only the old people. And always, when I saw them again, my heart would sink at the realization that this party would be a thankless repetition of the last party, at which nothing of note occurred.
Passing in a crowded kitchen, these other guests and I would lift our drinks and grimace painfully, recalling how little we had to say to one another. I kept busy by pretending I had goals; I made a vector of purpose as I crossed a room, to discourage unwanted conversational sallies.
We stood in corners in an invisible fortress, my best friend, my boyfriend and I. The three of us had strong opinions and we had high standards - standards we ourselves rarely met.
"There are those analytical philosophers again," I might say, nodding at a group of three nebbish grad students at the window. "From that housewarming in Cobble Hill."
"Philosophers," my best friend would muse. "Were they even smart?"
My boyfriend shook his head grimly. "Actually, quite stupid."
Not that we meant to be snide. We meant to be honest. In a fallen world, a world of dire futures and world leaders less educated than bridge builders, one thing we could do for ourselves was be honest. We found solidarity in judgment.
Finally my friend started seeing someone, and the routine of dull, sarcastic weekends was broken. The new man was kind and did not feel the need to build invisible fortresses. It was the end of an era, and I suspect we were all privately glad.
And then one night my friend called me in tears. Her new boyfriend had suddenly ended it. Could I come to see her? Of course, I said, and went out into the cold with a bottle of wine.
I found her alone in her apartment, sobbing. We sat on the couch and wrapped blankets around ourselves and I alternated between patting her blanketed knee and rubbing her shoulder, in the awkward way people have when they know a comforting touch is called for but are feeling self-conscious.
"I just don't understand," said my friend, again and again. "It really seemed good."
I would pat more on the knee or the arm and try to say something different from what I said five minutes earlier. I wanted her to feel comforted; I wanted her to feel that the new and now-ex-boyfriend was wrong and more than that unworthy, and that I was the ambassador from the rest of the world, there to illuminate this for her with startling clarity.
As the evening wore on, we drank more wine and began to speak in generalities, getting in a few jabs at the new and now-ex-boyfriend; and finally there came a moment when she looked placid, if not exactly cheerful.
"I know it'll be fine eventually," she said softly. "I just don't feel like being by myself right now."
"Well," I said, leaning forward with what I imagine was a sage, world-weary face - rather premature since I was 26 - "think of it as a rehearsal. I mean, really, we all die alone."
She stared at me and started to cry again.
On the subway headed home I felt a sense of shame. I realized I had long clung to a simple axiom: say what comes into your head, for this is called honesty. Honesty was good; and if we were honest and therefore good, others would be good, too, and out of this honest conversation a miraculous truth would arise. But here I was, ashamed, alone and full of cheap wine and gazing at an ad for Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, scourge of pimples throughout the five boroughs. It occurred to me for the first time that truth was not the same as impulse.
This recognition was real but initially fleeting. Later my friend ribbed me for what I'd said. When her ribbing irked me, I retorted: "Well, it's true, isn't it? I mean, we all do die alone."
She shook her head and smiled. "Honey," she said, "true has nothing to do with it."
She said this with her usual calm forbearance, but in the turn of an instant I went away from youth. Being young I had needed judgment to make myself distinct; because honesty was the way to judgment, I said whatever came to me, thinking the speed and plenty of my words made them true. I'd confused honesty with expedience.
And the way to the future was illuminated. From now on the task would no longer be separation and difference, no longer the sculpturing of a self to be distinct from other selves. From now on the task would be to find happiness in a crowd.
Lydia Millet is the author of several novels. Her most recent is "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Having Good References
One of the challenges and great opportunities and even pleasures of having multiple blogs is the variety they offer.
Be sure to check my other blogs from time to time for a variety of good writing on many different subjects.
As the list of links to the right indicate, I have a blog about some of my favorite things and a blog for articles about the rebuilding of New Orleans (my ancestral home) and a blog about gardening issues.
These other blogs are mostly extraordinary articles written about a certain subject, with a brief introduction as to why I am posting it.
All it takes is one "click" to explore these articles.
Enjoy.
Be sure to check my other blogs from time to time for a variety of good writing on many different subjects.
As the list of links to the right indicate, I have a blog about some of my favorite things and a blog for articles about the rebuilding of New Orleans (my ancestral home) and a blog about gardening issues.
These other blogs are mostly extraordinary articles written about a certain subject, with a brief introduction as to why I am posting it.
All it takes is one "click" to explore these articles.
Enjoy.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Power in New Orleans
The New York Times
November 19, 2005
New Orleans Utility Struggles to Relight a City of Darkness
By GARY RIVLIN
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 18 - From his temporary headquarters on the top floor of the Hyatt Regency here, Daniel F. Packer, the chief executive of Entergy New Orleans, has a perfect vantage point for viewing the problem confronting his beleaguered utility company: lights twinkling in dozens of neighborhoods, but darkness spread across 40 percent of the city.
Those vast stretches of New Orleans without access to electrical power represent the magnitude of work the utility must perform before the city can recover. Nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina, the afflicted areas include not only devastated sections of town like the Lower Ninth Ward but also neighborhoods that suffered relatively little water and wind damage.
To be sure, it is not just a lack of electrical power that is hindering the city's revival. Almost half of New Orleans lacks natural gas for cooking or heating, according to Entergy, even as temperatures here have fallen sharply in recent days, dipping below 40 degrees at night. Toilets in roughly half the homes are still not connected to the city's sewer system, municipal officials say. About a quarter of the city is still without drinkable water, they say, and some isolated patches have no running water at all, a circumstance that could prove disastrous in the event of a fire.
Still, no other ingredient is quite so critical to the recovery as power. And even in areas where the electricity or gas is back on, some customers have to wait for a city inspector's approval before getting it. The city requires such approval of any home or workplace that suffered wind or water damage from the storm, and several members of the City Council acknowledged that an inspector's arrival could take weeks.
"We're trying to get the city up and running so we have a viable tax base," Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell told Entergy officials this week at a meeting of the Council's Utilities Committee.
Under pressure from the Council and residents, Entergy has developed a plan to be providing electricity to at least 80 percent of customers by year's end, and gas services to 80 percent by mid-January.
But the company declines to attach a target date to the restoration of power in areas "too devastated to even make a reliable prediction," Mr. Packer said. That includes parts of the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, two predominantly black areas of the city, and Lakeview, a largely white middle-class community.
In the period immediately after the hurricane, Entergy encountered the ordinary post-storm headaches, like downed power lines and fallen utility poles, and also the extraordinary, including the severe damage that was done to substations when floodwaters covered much of the city. More than half of the utility's 42 substations in the metropolitan area were flooded, Mr. Packer said, along with two of its power plants.
So in the first weeks after the storm, Entergy brought in scores of extra workers to help repair its crippled system and, Mr. Packer said, was soon "ahead of the game." Then, on Sept. 23, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and at that point terminated all its contracts for outside workers.
Entergy had had "all this power available to people living in certain areas," but, with much of the city deserted, "there wasn't anyone here to take it," Mr. Packer said. And because of all the work, "we were burning cash at a time we couldn't afford to."
The utility's repair crew of roughly 200 workers, about evenly divided between electric and gas repairs, also had to contend with the damage the storm had inflicted on the maze of gas pipes that crisscross the city. The water that rushed into those pipes has been one large obstacle confronting Entergy workers as they labor to return gas service; pipes that cracked when buffeted by the floodwaters have been another.
The estimated cost of repairs to the utility's infrastructure is $260 million to $325 million, Mr. Packer said. Insurance will cover a part of that loss, but it remains unclear how much - or how the company will pay for the rest as it struggles to replace lost revenue.
"They're suffering from this double whammy," said Clinton A. Vince, a lawyer with Sullivan & Worcester in Washington who works as a consultant to the City Council's Utilities Committee. "They have these enormous recovery costs, but they don't have the customer base to cover it."
That base has been made all the smaller because many of the customers who would now be receiving power simply have not returned to New Orleans. Only about 30 percent of Entergy's electricity customers are now drawing power. For gas customers, the figure is less than 20 percent.
"To be without 70 percent of your electricity and gas customers more than 80 days after a storm is an unprecedented occurrence in the utility industry," said Curt Hébert, an executive vice president with Entergy New Orleans's parent, the Entergy Corporation, the country's fifth-largest power company.
The Entergy Corporation posted $350 million in profits in the three months ended Sept. 30, a 24 percent increase over the corresponding period last year. But company officials say regulators prohibit them from using money from any of its four other utilities to bail out the fifth. Entergy has granted its New Orleans subsidiary a $200 million line of credit, but the loan must be repaid.
Mr. Packer, the Entergy New Orleans chief executive, has made at least three trips to Washington, one this week, to meet with White House officials and members of Congress. He is in search of a $450 million bailout, for infrastructure repair and the expected amount of revenue loss, that is similar to the relief package requested by the New York power provider Consolidated Edison after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Con Ed asked Washington for $350 million and has so far received $93 million.) Mr. Packer's pleas, and those of the City Council members who have joined him, have elicited sympathy but as yet no dollars.
Without federal relief, Mr. Packer and others say, the utility may have to raise its rates 140 percent.
"We're not asking for anything different from what the folks in Manhattan got after the tragedy of 9/11," Mr. Hébert said.
Mr. Packer also warned that if relief did not come soon, the city might have no choice but to take over the company. That might seem good news for consumers, he said, but the utility would no longer have the buying power it enjoys in the energy market as part of a large conglomerate .
Several weeks ago, Entergy announced that large parts of the city would not have electrical service until mid-2006. The resulting roar of complaints spurred the company to shift strategy. On Thursday, the City Council approved an Entergy plan to use $11.2 million that had been earmarked for other purposes, including $6.8 million in a fund devoted to improving customers' energy efficiency. The extra money will allow the company to more than double the size of its repair crews.
###
November 19, 2005
New Orleans Utility Struggles to Relight a City of Darkness
By GARY RIVLIN
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 18 - From his temporary headquarters on the top floor of the Hyatt Regency here, Daniel F. Packer, the chief executive of Entergy New Orleans, has a perfect vantage point for viewing the problem confronting his beleaguered utility company: lights twinkling in dozens of neighborhoods, but darkness spread across 40 percent of the city.
Those vast stretches of New Orleans without access to electrical power represent the magnitude of work the utility must perform before the city can recover. Nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina, the afflicted areas include not only devastated sections of town like the Lower Ninth Ward but also neighborhoods that suffered relatively little water and wind damage.
To be sure, it is not just a lack of electrical power that is hindering the city's revival. Almost half of New Orleans lacks natural gas for cooking or heating, according to Entergy, even as temperatures here have fallen sharply in recent days, dipping below 40 degrees at night. Toilets in roughly half the homes are still not connected to the city's sewer system, municipal officials say. About a quarter of the city is still without drinkable water, they say, and some isolated patches have no running water at all, a circumstance that could prove disastrous in the event of a fire.
Still, no other ingredient is quite so critical to the recovery as power. And even in areas where the electricity or gas is back on, some customers have to wait for a city inspector's approval before getting it. The city requires such approval of any home or workplace that suffered wind or water damage from the storm, and several members of the City Council acknowledged that an inspector's arrival could take weeks.
"We're trying to get the city up and running so we have a viable tax base," Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell told Entergy officials this week at a meeting of the Council's Utilities Committee.
Under pressure from the Council and residents, Entergy has developed a plan to be providing electricity to at least 80 percent of customers by year's end, and gas services to 80 percent by mid-January.
But the company declines to attach a target date to the restoration of power in areas "too devastated to even make a reliable prediction," Mr. Packer said. That includes parts of the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, two predominantly black areas of the city, and Lakeview, a largely white middle-class community.
In the period immediately after the hurricane, Entergy encountered the ordinary post-storm headaches, like downed power lines and fallen utility poles, and also the extraordinary, including the severe damage that was done to substations when floodwaters covered much of the city. More than half of the utility's 42 substations in the metropolitan area were flooded, Mr. Packer said, along with two of its power plants.
So in the first weeks after the storm, Entergy brought in scores of extra workers to help repair its crippled system and, Mr. Packer said, was soon "ahead of the game." Then, on Sept. 23, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and at that point terminated all its contracts for outside workers.
Entergy had had "all this power available to people living in certain areas," but, with much of the city deserted, "there wasn't anyone here to take it," Mr. Packer said. And because of all the work, "we were burning cash at a time we couldn't afford to."
The utility's repair crew of roughly 200 workers, about evenly divided between electric and gas repairs, also had to contend with the damage the storm had inflicted on the maze of gas pipes that crisscross the city. The water that rushed into those pipes has been one large obstacle confronting Entergy workers as they labor to return gas service; pipes that cracked when buffeted by the floodwaters have been another.
The estimated cost of repairs to the utility's infrastructure is $260 million to $325 million, Mr. Packer said. Insurance will cover a part of that loss, but it remains unclear how much - or how the company will pay for the rest as it struggles to replace lost revenue.
"They're suffering from this double whammy," said Clinton A. Vince, a lawyer with Sullivan & Worcester in Washington who works as a consultant to the City Council's Utilities Committee. "They have these enormous recovery costs, but they don't have the customer base to cover it."
That base has been made all the smaller because many of the customers who would now be receiving power simply have not returned to New Orleans. Only about 30 percent of Entergy's electricity customers are now drawing power. For gas customers, the figure is less than 20 percent.
"To be without 70 percent of your electricity and gas customers more than 80 days after a storm is an unprecedented occurrence in the utility industry," said Curt Hébert, an executive vice president with Entergy New Orleans's parent, the Entergy Corporation, the country's fifth-largest power company.
The Entergy Corporation posted $350 million in profits in the three months ended Sept. 30, a 24 percent increase over the corresponding period last year. But company officials say regulators prohibit them from using money from any of its four other utilities to bail out the fifth. Entergy has granted its New Orleans subsidiary a $200 million line of credit, but the loan must be repaid.
Mr. Packer, the Entergy New Orleans chief executive, has made at least three trips to Washington, one this week, to meet with White House officials and members of Congress. He is in search of a $450 million bailout, for infrastructure repair and the expected amount of revenue loss, that is similar to the relief package requested by the New York power provider Consolidated Edison after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Con Ed asked Washington for $350 million and has so far received $93 million.) Mr. Packer's pleas, and those of the City Council members who have joined him, have elicited sympathy but as yet no dollars.
Without federal relief, Mr. Packer and others say, the utility may have to raise its rates 140 percent.
"We're not asking for anything different from what the folks in Manhattan got after the tragedy of 9/11," Mr. Hébert said.
Mr. Packer also warned that if relief did not come soon, the city might have no choice but to take over the company. That might seem good news for consumers, he said, but the utility would no longer have the buying power it enjoys in the energy market as part of a large conglomerate .
Several weeks ago, Entergy announced that large parts of the city would not have electrical service until mid-2006. The resulting roar of complaints spurred the company to shift strategy. On Thursday, the City Council approved an Entergy plan to use $11.2 million that had been earmarked for other purposes, including $6.8 million in a fund devoted to improving customers' energy efficiency. The extra money will allow the company to more than double the size of its repair crews.
###
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Save the Horse Farm
SAVE THE HORSE FARM!
The most beautiful Green Space remaining in our city, the former UL Lafayette Horse Farm on Johnston Street, is presently scheduled for rezoning and commercial development. Unless the caring and creative citizens of Lafayette step forward immediately, one of the last remaining gems in our urban landscape will merge with the commercial blight of Johnston Street. We have now begun the dialogue concerning our community vision and how to achieve it.
As a group of concerned Lafayette citizens and UL students, we would like to encourage the Lafayette and UL communities participation in creating alternatives to the commercial development of the UL Horse
Farm, a tax-payer owned property. We would like to achieve consensus in a plan that would accomodate every party’s needs - UL, the surrounding neighborhoods, and the citizens of Lafayette.
In order to facilitate public participation in this process, we would like to extend an invitation to all community members, UL administration, city officials and UL students to attend a series of round-table discussions on these issues. These meetings will be held Thursday, weekly upstairs in the UL Union Laginappe Room at 5:30.
This is an opportunity for Lafayette citizens to create the city that we live in. We know what we want our city to look like - lets work together to make it happen.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
WRITE: a personal statement about the value of this Green Space to our community and mail to:
Zoning Commission, c/o Jim Parker
220 West Willow Street, Building B
Lafayette, LA 70502
EMAIL: jparker@lafayettegov.net
FAX : 291-8492
(NOTE: your comments will be given to commission members)
SHOW UP at the Zoning Commission meeting:
Monday, December 5th at 5 pm
at City Hall
SIGN THE PETITION
Please include your address on the petition to verify that the undersigned are from Lafayette! Names without addresses may not be counted in the final total!
CONTACT YOUR COUNCILMEN
RELATED NEWS ARTICLES
The Daily Advertiser : University to Sell Former Farm Site
The Daily Advertiser : UL Deal Includes Land Swap
The Advocate : ULL Offers Some Details of Land Deal
The Independent : Cold Shoulder
The Daily Advertiser: Students Fight to Save Green Acreage
The Independent : Suspect Swap
Ragin Pagin Sticky Post About the Horse Farm
The Daily Advertiser : UL Farm Supporters Meet to Oppose Development
The Advocate : Foes Discuss ULL Land Swap
The Independent: Horse Play
Community Meetings
ALL meetings are Thursdays at 5:30pm in the Lagniappe Room at the UL Union. The dates of the meetings are as follows:
October 27th
November 3rd
November 10th
November 17th
TUESDAY November 22nd
NOT November 24th (Thanksgiving)
December 1st
ALL meetings are open to the general public and the student body! Public participation is important!
If you would like to get involved or learn more, please contact
horsefarm@gmail.com.
GET “SAVE THE HORSE FARM” STUFF!
For T-Shirts, call Danica at (337)235-6149
For Yard Signs and Bumper Stickers, call EB at (337)781-9766
Get the word out! We appreciate your support.
*
*
Committees and Contact Information
o City Councilmen Contact Information
o City/Parish Zoning Commission Members
o Community Vision / City Planning
o Democracy
o Environmental
o Fundraising/Alternate Planning
o Media
o Rezoning
o University Expansion / ROTC Use
Download the Flyer
Download the Petition
Save the Horse Farm
The most beautiful Green Space remaining in our city, the former UL Lafayette Horse Farm on Johnston Street, is presently scheduled for rezoning and commercial development. Unless the caring and creative citizens of Lafayette step forward immediately, one of the last remaining gems in our urban landscape will merge with the commercial blight of Johnston Street. We have now begun the dialogue concerning our community vision and how to achieve it.
As a group of concerned Lafayette citizens and UL students, we would like to encourage the Lafayette and UL communities participation in creating alternatives to the commercial development of the UL Horse
Farm, a tax-payer owned property. We would like to achieve consensus in a plan that would accomodate every party’s needs - UL, the surrounding neighborhoods, and the citizens of Lafayette.
In order to facilitate public participation in this process, we would like to extend an invitation to all community members, UL administration, city officials and UL students to attend a series of round-table discussions on these issues. These meetings will be held Thursday, weekly upstairs in the UL Union Laginappe Room at 5:30.
This is an opportunity for Lafayette citizens to create the city that we live in. We know what we want our city to look like - lets work together to make it happen.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
WRITE: a personal statement about the value of this Green Space to our community and mail to:
Zoning Commission, c/o Jim Parker
220 West Willow Street, Building B
Lafayette, LA 70502
EMAIL: jparker@lafayettegov.net
FAX : 291-8492
(NOTE: your comments will be given to commission members)
SHOW UP at the Zoning Commission meeting:
Monday, December 5th at 5 pm
at City Hall
SIGN THE PETITION
Please include your address on the petition to verify that the undersigned are from Lafayette! Names without addresses may not be counted in the final total!
CONTACT YOUR COUNCILMEN
RELATED NEWS ARTICLES
The Daily Advertiser : University to Sell Former Farm Site
The Daily Advertiser : UL Deal Includes Land Swap
The Advocate : ULL Offers Some Details of Land Deal
The Independent : Cold Shoulder
The Daily Advertiser: Students Fight to Save Green Acreage
The Independent : Suspect Swap
Ragin Pagin Sticky Post About the Horse Farm
The Daily Advertiser : UL Farm Supporters Meet to Oppose Development
The Advocate : Foes Discuss ULL Land Swap
The Independent: Horse Play
Community Meetings
ALL meetings are Thursdays at 5:30pm in the Lagniappe Room at the UL Union. The dates of the meetings are as follows:
October 27th
November 3rd
November 10th
November 17th
TUESDAY November 22nd
NOT November 24th (Thanksgiving)
December 1st
ALL meetings are open to the general public and the student body! Public participation is important!
If you would like to get involved or learn more, please contact
horsefarm@gmail.com.
GET “SAVE THE HORSE FARM” STUFF!
For T-Shirts, call Danica at (337)235-6149
For Yard Signs and Bumper Stickers, call EB at (337)781-9766
Get the word out! We appreciate your support.
*
*
Committees and Contact Information
o City Councilmen Contact Information
o City/Parish Zoning Commission Members
o Community Vision / City Planning
o Democracy
o Environmental
o Fundraising/Alternate Planning
o Media
o Rezoning
o University Expansion / ROTC Use
Download the Flyer
Download the Petition
Save the Horse Farm
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Local Flavor
"Localism alone can lead to culture." - William Carlos Williams
Over the past several months, I have frequented several local events throughout Acadiana that were all extraordinary in one way or the other - but that may, I hope, become quite commonplace among even more local cities and towns of every size, from Lafayette's 250,000+ hurricane-boosted population to Maurice's few hundred.
Among these events were :
1. Farmers' Markets
2. Productions of plays
3. Fairs and Festivals
In each of these towns, from Crowley to Rayne to New Iberia to St Martinville to Breaux Bridge to Abbeville to Eunice to Opelousas to Grand Coteau to Lafayette at the center of it all to others in between and too numerous to mention, there was a positive spirit that was visible, palpable, breathable, tasteable, hearable and touchable.
Neither force of nature (recent hurricanes) nor force of negative personality (blame seekers) could diminish what was natyurally present in the hearts, minds, and most importantnly, souls of those who peopled these events, from the unselfish planners to those who attended.
This Thanksgiving, simply look around you if you need a reason to be thankful.
We are a remarkable people, those of us who live in Acadiana, and God Bless each and every one of you for the way you behaved and continue to behave as we continue to recover from the various challenges thrown at us.
As someone who's recently returned from another part of the country and resettled in this my home area, I feel more than ever as Dorothy felt in the Emerald City : There's No Place Like Home.
Over the past several months, I have frequented several local events throughout Acadiana that were all extraordinary in one way or the other - but that may, I hope, become quite commonplace among even more local cities and towns of every size, from Lafayette's 250,000+ hurricane-boosted population to Maurice's few hundred.
Among these events were :
1. Farmers' Markets
2. Productions of plays
3. Fairs and Festivals
In each of these towns, from Crowley to Rayne to New Iberia to St Martinville to Breaux Bridge to Abbeville to Eunice to Opelousas to Grand Coteau to Lafayette at the center of it all to others in between and too numerous to mention, there was a positive spirit that was visible, palpable, breathable, tasteable, hearable and touchable.
Neither force of nature (recent hurricanes) nor force of negative personality (blame seekers) could diminish what was natyurally present in the hearts, minds, and most importantnly, souls of those who peopled these events, from the unselfish planners to those who attended.
This Thanksgiving, simply look around you if you need a reason to be thankful.
We are a remarkable people, those of us who live in Acadiana, and God Bless each and every one of you for the way you behaved and continue to behave as we continue to recover from the various challenges thrown at us.
As someone who's recently returned from another part of the country and resettled in this my home area, I feel more than ever as Dorothy felt in the Emerald City : There's No Place Like Home.
Monday, November 14, 2005
What is Charity ?
The New York Times
November 14, 2005
What Is Charity?
By STEPHANIE STROM
ACROSS the country, nonprofit leaders who battle poverty saw hope in Hurricane Katrina, which starkly illustrated how even something as evenhanded as a natural disaster can discriminate against the have-nots.
"Suddenly, everyone was talking about poor people," said Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a former nun who has devoted herself to the poor as a public official and is now a charity executive. "It seemed to dawn on everyone that we didn't win the war on poverty."
Yet, among the many who had been turning away from Americans most in need of charity was the philanthropic sector itself. Last year, the share of giving going to organizations most directly related to helping the poor hit a record low, accounting for less than 10 percent of the $248 billion donated by Americans and their philanthropic institutions.
Adjusted for inflation, gifts to health groups have almost tripled over the last four decades, and those to educational institutions have risen almost fourfold, while donations to human services groups are up only 28 percent.
Other statistics also suggest that the nonprofit sector has drifted from core notions of charity. Nonprofit hospitals provide no more charity care than taxpaying counterparts do. While university assets soar, tuition continues to outpace inflation. Only a sliver of giving to churches is spent on social services. Last year, of the 14 gifts that exceeded $100 million, only one - a $1.5 billion bequest to the Salvation Army from Joan B. Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald's - went to a human services organization, Forbes magazine says.
"In general, philanthropy seems to have stopped talking about poverty and race," said Jan Masaoka, executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, which tries to strengthen charities. Small groups still get funding, but the sector "in some ways has retreated from taking on poverty in a larger-scale, more direct way."
So what is charity today if it is not aimed primarily at the have-nots? Has its definition been stretched so broadly that it no longer has meaning? If so, are the tax breaks that propel our philanthropy justified? Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has raised those questions in a series of hearings examining whether tax exemption is justified for certain types of nonprofits.
The question, in his words, is, "What is the taxpayer getting in return for the tens of billions of dollars per year in tax subsidy" offered to donors through tax write-offs or to nonprofits through their tax exemptions? According to the Treasury Department, the charitable deduction will amount this year to a $40 billion tax subsidy, mostly to upper-income households - overshadowing the roughly $20 billion the human services sector is likely to raise. No official estimates exist for the cost of the tax exemption covering money that nonprofits spend and for the property they own.
The hearings have received little public notice but have terrified nonprofit leaders, more than a Senate Finance Committee threat to tighten regulation of charities.
"When you start to ask what is the fundamental underlying rationale for tax exemption and the charitable deduction for donors, it leads to questions that are far more difficult to answer than questions about greater disclosure and better governance," said John D. Colombo, a tax-law professor at the University of Illinois who testified before Rep. Thomas. "It gets you to questions like, why should an institution with billions in the bank get tax exemption?"
Relieving the plight of the poor is the bedrock of charity, dating as far back as when the Roman Empire became Christian, and donations that had honored the gods were instead aimed at the underprivileged. But the English code that grew into the foundation for laws governing nonprofit organizations, the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses, better known as the Statute of Elizabeth, defined charity's purposes much more broadly, covering everything from bridge repairs and the education of orphans to the "marriage of poor maids." From this seed grew the current vibrant nonprofit sector, and the murkiness that now equates a university with a multibillion-dollar endowment with a local Boys and Girls Club.
"We simply don't have a coherent rationale for what it is we call charity," Professor Colombo said. "So we have these vastly different sorts of organizations doing vastly different things and calling it charity."
Representative Thomas and others are particularly vexed by nonprofit hospitals, often noting that data from the American Hospital Association calculated that their average spending on uncompensated care was 4.4 percent of their costs in 2002, compared with 4.5 percent for their commercial cousins.
Representative Charles Rangel of New York, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, has asked whether a better target may be universities, which sit on tens of billions of dollars in assets while tuition increases are outpacing inflation.
Of course, some portion of contributions made to health, education and religious institutions, which are the recipients of most philanthropy, do benefit the poor. Universities provide tuition assistance to students from low-income families, medical research can alleviate problems like asthma, which is a particular issue for the poor, and churches engage in a variety of activities to help the needy.
Experts say, however, that the money trickling down that far is usually quite limited. "There is a big debate about how much of the giving in those sectors eventually flows to charity, as in day care centers, family counseling, drug abuse counseling and after-school youth programs," said Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "I'm not for a really narrow definition of charity, but at the end of the day, it's distressing that human services attracts such a small slice of overall giving."
Research by Mark Chaves, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona who was principal investigator of the 1998 National Congregations Study, the first comprehensive study of churches and their spending, showed that less than 3 percent of the average congregation's total budget was spent on social services.
The average university spent 4.8 percent of its endowment on its operations last year, according to the 2005 Commonfund Benchmark Study, an annual look at education endowments. But its return on investments increased 14.7 percent. At Harvard University's current rate of growth, its endowment will be larger than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest foundation, in three years. And while Harvard increased its spending last year on financial aid for undergraduates to $80 million a year, that figure represents less than .5 percent of its $22 billion endowment, and only about 2 percent of the approximately $4 billion it earned last year on its investments.
"For the past 15 to 20 years, educational institutions have been funded primarily by tuition and fees, not donations," Professor Colombo said. "We're conditioned to think of them as charities, but they aren't."
Not surprisingly, leaders of nonprofit institutions take exception to the criticisms being aired in Congress. In a statement submitted to the Ways and Means Committee, the Alliance for Advancing Nonprofit Hospitals called the figures on charitable care a "cursory" analysis that missed crucial differences with commercial hospitals. Sheldon Steinbach, the general counsel of the American Council on Education, called the focus on endowments "an easy cheap shot." Universities, he said, may be legally prohibited from spending their endowments to reduce the costs of college.
But beyond the question of what large institutions do with their money is another debate: why donors are giving less to charities focused on America's poor.
Many of the biggest foundations fighting poverty have turned their focus overseas. The Gates Foundation, for instance, has given more than $5 billion for health issues abroad. But it also does work at home. It has spent heavily around the country on education, particularly at high schools, and in the Pacific Northwest donated $556 million to food banks, transitional housing for homeless families, shelters for battered women and other human services. Greg Shaw, who oversees the group's giving in that region, sees a link in these different spheres. "The one thing that really cuts across all areas of our giving is inequity," he said.
What's more, the foundation has a category it calls "special projects," $562 million dispensed solely at the discretion of the Gateses themselves. While part of that money has gone to universities, much of it has been given to groups like the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law and the Society of St. Vincent De Paul.
When it comes to raising money directly, most human services groups have weak fund-raising operations, if any, and their board members typically lack the resources of those who serve as trustees of universities or museums.
Their missions also hamper their fund-raising efforts. "You can build compassion for certain things, but there are things we work with like substance abuse, child abuse and domestic violence that the average donor just can't relate to," Ms. Barrios-Paoli, the former nun, said.
Ms. Barrios-Paoli is the executive director of Safe Space, a charity that operates group homes for foster children, services for abused children and health and mental health services for poor families in New York City. It holds two benefits a year, generating $70,000 to $80,000 each, a fraction of what most private schools in Manhattan raise at a single similar event. It has one fund-raising executive and two other employees who solicit grants from foundations.
Over all, private donations account for roughly 3 percent of Safe Space's $18.5 million budget. The rest comes from contracts it has with the state and local governments.
Its board members are professionals who contribute what they can, but it does not require them to give a minimum amount each year like many of the city's more elite charities do. "They're great, very dedicated and committed, but it's not the board of the Met," Ms. Barrios-Paoli said, referring to the Metropolitan Opera, whose board includes one Forbes 400 member, the wives of two others and the son of another.
Ms. Barrios-Paoli listed the benefits of being a Met board member, from special seats to audiences with Placido Domingo. "All I can offer my board is a tour of a foster home or a community kitchen," she said.
James S. Tisch, president and chief executive of the Loews Corporation, whose family cuts a wide swath in philanthropic circles, agreed. "That's always part of it, putting together a board and creating an aura that it's a group that other people want to be part of," he said. "Museums have done that very well, and hospitals."
Mr. Tisch is a trustee at Mount Sinai Hospital, where his family has given enough money to have its name on a building, but he has also served on the board of FEGS, a cluster of charities offering a range of social services, for more than two decades.
FEGS, like Safe Spaces, is mostly supported by income from government contracts, and Mr. Tisch cited that as the biggest reason giving to human services has shrunk. "Why should a philanthropist pay if the government will?" he asked.
The federal budget for health and human services rose 183 percent, adjusted for inflation, to $459.4 billion in 2002 from $68.3 billion in 1980, according to research by Patrick Rooney, director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Nonprofit leaders counter that they have been forced to seek more government support as donations have declined. "It becomes a chicken and egg kind of thing," said Peter B. Goldberg, chief executive of Alliance for Families and Children, which represents more than 300 family service groups nationwide. "I'd argue that my agencies have become increasingly dependent on public sector funding because nongovernmental funding simply hasn't kept pace."
One reason for that failure, Mr. Goldberg says, is the increased demand by donors for proof of some return on their dollars. "This is a tremendous challenge for human services," he said. "We don't have good ways of measuring what we do, yet that's what donors want from us."
The few social service agencies that have found ways of demonstrating the benefits of their services get at least some positive responses. Lifetrack Resources Inc., a Minnesota nonprofit that helps poor families, has increased the portion of its budget underwritten by donations. Terry Anderson, its vice president for development, attributes some of the growth to its increasing reliance on metrics to prove its success.
Using a 42-year study of the effect of preschool programs on children who are developmentally delayed because of abuse or neglect, Lifetrack calculates that every dollar invested in its own preschool program produces a $17 return in services the children will not need in the future.
Similarly, for every dollar spent on employment services, Lifetrack says it saves the public $2.34 that would have been spent on welfare, not to mention the increase in tax revenue generated by the people it helps to find work.
"This kind of metric is becoming part of our brand, and it came as a result of our board asking why we weren't looking at ourselves that way," Ms. Anderson said.
Ms. Anderson was hired by Lifetrack in 1987 to increase support from foundations and corporations, which totals about 6 percent of its $10 million budget. Recently she has turned her attention to individual donors, whose contributions have doubled over the last couple of years, but only to $70,000.
"If there's one thing that's true, it's that people give to people because they have a personal connection to the place they're giving to, and people who have personal connections to human service organizations are not usually people with money, " Ms. Anderson said.
That assertion is supported by demographic data showing that older donors, particularly women, have been the biggest supporters of groups helping the poor, said Robert F. Sharpe, a fund-raising consultant. Those donors are dying out, he said, and the emerging generation of baby boomer donors is less likely to support social service organizations. "People who grew up in comfortable, clean, prosperous suburbs have just never had as much familiarity with how many others live," Mr. Sharpe said.
"Many commentators talked about how the Katrina disaster pulled back the curtain and exposed the extent of poverty that exists in many American communities," he said. "Perhaps one effect of that may be renewed interest among younger Americans in organizations that are working to meet the needs of the poor and otherwise disadvantaged among us."
###
November 14, 2005
What Is Charity?
By STEPHANIE STROM
ACROSS the country, nonprofit leaders who battle poverty saw hope in Hurricane Katrina, which starkly illustrated how even something as evenhanded as a natural disaster can discriminate against the have-nots.
"Suddenly, everyone was talking about poor people," said Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a former nun who has devoted herself to the poor as a public official and is now a charity executive. "It seemed to dawn on everyone that we didn't win the war on poverty."
Yet, among the many who had been turning away from Americans most in need of charity was the philanthropic sector itself. Last year, the share of giving going to organizations most directly related to helping the poor hit a record low, accounting for less than 10 percent of the $248 billion donated by Americans and their philanthropic institutions.
Adjusted for inflation, gifts to health groups have almost tripled over the last four decades, and those to educational institutions have risen almost fourfold, while donations to human services groups are up only 28 percent.
Other statistics also suggest that the nonprofit sector has drifted from core notions of charity. Nonprofit hospitals provide no more charity care than taxpaying counterparts do. While university assets soar, tuition continues to outpace inflation. Only a sliver of giving to churches is spent on social services. Last year, of the 14 gifts that exceeded $100 million, only one - a $1.5 billion bequest to the Salvation Army from Joan B. Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald's - went to a human services organization, Forbes magazine says.
"In general, philanthropy seems to have stopped talking about poverty and race," said Jan Masaoka, executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, which tries to strengthen charities. Small groups still get funding, but the sector "in some ways has retreated from taking on poverty in a larger-scale, more direct way."
So what is charity today if it is not aimed primarily at the have-nots? Has its definition been stretched so broadly that it no longer has meaning? If so, are the tax breaks that propel our philanthropy justified? Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has raised those questions in a series of hearings examining whether tax exemption is justified for certain types of nonprofits.
The question, in his words, is, "What is the taxpayer getting in return for the tens of billions of dollars per year in tax subsidy" offered to donors through tax write-offs or to nonprofits through their tax exemptions? According to the Treasury Department, the charitable deduction will amount this year to a $40 billion tax subsidy, mostly to upper-income households - overshadowing the roughly $20 billion the human services sector is likely to raise. No official estimates exist for the cost of the tax exemption covering money that nonprofits spend and for the property they own.
The hearings have received little public notice but have terrified nonprofit leaders, more than a Senate Finance Committee threat to tighten regulation of charities.
"When you start to ask what is the fundamental underlying rationale for tax exemption and the charitable deduction for donors, it leads to questions that are far more difficult to answer than questions about greater disclosure and better governance," said John D. Colombo, a tax-law professor at the University of Illinois who testified before Rep. Thomas. "It gets you to questions like, why should an institution with billions in the bank get tax exemption?"
Relieving the plight of the poor is the bedrock of charity, dating as far back as when the Roman Empire became Christian, and donations that had honored the gods were instead aimed at the underprivileged. But the English code that grew into the foundation for laws governing nonprofit organizations, the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses, better known as the Statute of Elizabeth, defined charity's purposes much more broadly, covering everything from bridge repairs and the education of orphans to the "marriage of poor maids." From this seed grew the current vibrant nonprofit sector, and the murkiness that now equates a university with a multibillion-dollar endowment with a local Boys and Girls Club.
"We simply don't have a coherent rationale for what it is we call charity," Professor Colombo said. "So we have these vastly different sorts of organizations doing vastly different things and calling it charity."
Representative Thomas and others are particularly vexed by nonprofit hospitals, often noting that data from the American Hospital Association calculated that their average spending on uncompensated care was 4.4 percent of their costs in 2002, compared with 4.5 percent for their commercial cousins.
Representative Charles Rangel of New York, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, has asked whether a better target may be universities, which sit on tens of billions of dollars in assets while tuition increases are outpacing inflation.
Of course, some portion of contributions made to health, education and religious institutions, which are the recipients of most philanthropy, do benefit the poor. Universities provide tuition assistance to students from low-income families, medical research can alleviate problems like asthma, which is a particular issue for the poor, and churches engage in a variety of activities to help the needy.
Experts say, however, that the money trickling down that far is usually quite limited. "There is a big debate about how much of the giving in those sectors eventually flows to charity, as in day care centers, family counseling, drug abuse counseling and after-school youth programs," said Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "I'm not for a really narrow definition of charity, but at the end of the day, it's distressing that human services attracts such a small slice of overall giving."
Research by Mark Chaves, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona who was principal investigator of the 1998 National Congregations Study, the first comprehensive study of churches and their spending, showed that less than 3 percent of the average congregation's total budget was spent on social services.
The average university spent 4.8 percent of its endowment on its operations last year, according to the 2005 Commonfund Benchmark Study, an annual look at education endowments. But its return on investments increased 14.7 percent. At Harvard University's current rate of growth, its endowment will be larger than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest foundation, in three years. And while Harvard increased its spending last year on financial aid for undergraduates to $80 million a year, that figure represents less than .5 percent of its $22 billion endowment, and only about 2 percent of the approximately $4 billion it earned last year on its investments.
"For the past 15 to 20 years, educational institutions have been funded primarily by tuition and fees, not donations," Professor Colombo said. "We're conditioned to think of them as charities, but they aren't."
Not surprisingly, leaders of nonprofit institutions take exception to the criticisms being aired in Congress. In a statement submitted to the Ways and Means Committee, the Alliance for Advancing Nonprofit Hospitals called the figures on charitable care a "cursory" analysis that missed crucial differences with commercial hospitals. Sheldon Steinbach, the general counsel of the American Council on Education, called the focus on endowments "an easy cheap shot." Universities, he said, may be legally prohibited from spending their endowments to reduce the costs of college.
But beyond the question of what large institutions do with their money is another debate: why donors are giving less to charities focused on America's poor.
Many of the biggest foundations fighting poverty have turned their focus overseas. The Gates Foundation, for instance, has given more than $5 billion for health issues abroad. But it also does work at home. It has spent heavily around the country on education, particularly at high schools, and in the Pacific Northwest donated $556 million to food banks, transitional housing for homeless families, shelters for battered women and other human services. Greg Shaw, who oversees the group's giving in that region, sees a link in these different spheres. "The one thing that really cuts across all areas of our giving is inequity," he said.
What's more, the foundation has a category it calls "special projects," $562 million dispensed solely at the discretion of the Gateses themselves. While part of that money has gone to universities, much of it has been given to groups like the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law and the Society of St. Vincent De Paul.
When it comes to raising money directly, most human services groups have weak fund-raising operations, if any, and their board members typically lack the resources of those who serve as trustees of universities or museums.
Their missions also hamper their fund-raising efforts. "You can build compassion for certain things, but there are things we work with like substance abuse, child abuse and domestic violence that the average donor just can't relate to," Ms. Barrios-Paoli, the former nun, said.
Ms. Barrios-Paoli is the executive director of Safe Space, a charity that operates group homes for foster children, services for abused children and health and mental health services for poor families in New York City. It holds two benefits a year, generating $70,000 to $80,000 each, a fraction of what most private schools in Manhattan raise at a single similar event. It has one fund-raising executive and two other employees who solicit grants from foundations.
Over all, private donations account for roughly 3 percent of Safe Space's $18.5 million budget. The rest comes from contracts it has with the state and local governments.
Its board members are professionals who contribute what they can, but it does not require them to give a minimum amount each year like many of the city's more elite charities do. "They're great, very dedicated and committed, but it's not the board of the Met," Ms. Barrios-Paoli said, referring to the Metropolitan Opera, whose board includes one Forbes 400 member, the wives of two others and the son of another.
Ms. Barrios-Paoli listed the benefits of being a Met board member, from special seats to audiences with Placido Domingo. "All I can offer my board is a tour of a foster home or a community kitchen," she said.
James S. Tisch, president and chief executive of the Loews Corporation, whose family cuts a wide swath in philanthropic circles, agreed. "That's always part of it, putting together a board and creating an aura that it's a group that other people want to be part of," he said. "Museums have done that very well, and hospitals."
Mr. Tisch is a trustee at Mount Sinai Hospital, where his family has given enough money to have its name on a building, but he has also served on the board of FEGS, a cluster of charities offering a range of social services, for more than two decades.
FEGS, like Safe Spaces, is mostly supported by income from government contracts, and Mr. Tisch cited that as the biggest reason giving to human services has shrunk. "Why should a philanthropist pay if the government will?" he asked.
The federal budget for health and human services rose 183 percent, adjusted for inflation, to $459.4 billion in 2002 from $68.3 billion in 1980, according to research by Patrick Rooney, director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Nonprofit leaders counter that they have been forced to seek more government support as donations have declined. "It becomes a chicken and egg kind of thing," said Peter B. Goldberg, chief executive of Alliance for Families and Children, which represents more than 300 family service groups nationwide. "I'd argue that my agencies have become increasingly dependent on public sector funding because nongovernmental funding simply hasn't kept pace."
One reason for that failure, Mr. Goldberg says, is the increased demand by donors for proof of some return on their dollars. "This is a tremendous challenge for human services," he said. "We don't have good ways of measuring what we do, yet that's what donors want from us."
The few social service agencies that have found ways of demonstrating the benefits of their services get at least some positive responses. Lifetrack Resources Inc., a Minnesota nonprofit that helps poor families, has increased the portion of its budget underwritten by donations. Terry Anderson, its vice president for development, attributes some of the growth to its increasing reliance on metrics to prove its success.
Using a 42-year study of the effect of preschool programs on children who are developmentally delayed because of abuse or neglect, Lifetrack calculates that every dollar invested in its own preschool program produces a $17 return in services the children will not need in the future.
Similarly, for every dollar spent on employment services, Lifetrack says it saves the public $2.34 that would have been spent on welfare, not to mention the increase in tax revenue generated by the people it helps to find work.
"This kind of metric is becoming part of our brand, and it came as a result of our board asking why we weren't looking at ourselves that way," Ms. Anderson said.
Ms. Anderson was hired by Lifetrack in 1987 to increase support from foundations and corporations, which totals about 6 percent of its $10 million budget. Recently she has turned her attention to individual donors, whose contributions have doubled over the last couple of years, but only to $70,000.
"If there's one thing that's true, it's that people give to people because they have a personal connection to the place they're giving to, and people who have personal connections to human service organizations are not usually people with money, " Ms. Anderson said.
That assertion is supported by demographic data showing that older donors, particularly women, have been the biggest supporters of groups helping the poor, said Robert F. Sharpe, a fund-raising consultant. Those donors are dying out, he said, and the emerging generation of baby boomer donors is less likely to support social service organizations. "People who grew up in comfortable, clean, prosperous suburbs have just never had as much familiarity with how many others live," Mr. Sharpe said.
"Many commentators talked about how the Katrina disaster pulled back the curtain and exposed the extent of poverty that exists in many American communities," he said. "Perhaps one effect of that may be renewed interest among younger Americans in organizations that are working to meet the needs of the poor and otherwise disadvantaged among us."
###
Sunday, November 13, 2005
"FrAussies" invade Acadiana !
Sister J C and friend in AustraliaA trio of French-Autralians ("FrAussies") invaded Acadiana under the cover of darkness near midnight Saturday.
Their presence will not long go undetected.
Although we have award-winning photographs of the three invaders to share online in this very blog, - they are so huge (1.29 mb each !) that we will have to wait to post them until we either learn how to reduce them via photoshop (anyone - please email instructions to me if you know how to do that, at funburn@gmail.com ) or that will be done when Auntie Artist S.M. arrives on the scene - she is coming home from Belle Chase Wednesday, according to the latest sightings and reports from her home front.
GAussie (girl FrAussie) M.C. will turn 8 Nov 28th and BAussie (Boy FrAussie) H.A. will turn 6 Dec 2, so they is a big visit for the pair, who are full of life and will dominate any gathering of which they are a part for the next three weeks.
Don't miss it !
Schedule you visit now !
Upon arriving at Houston's Bush International airport, Boy Aussie H jumped into the arms of his waiting Aunt J - and Girl Aussie M followed soon after. They had been on a plane and/or in transit for more than 22 hours - since leaving Sydney around noon Saturday Sydney time.
Although it was 7pm local Houston tinne - the pair wanted to play games and so we engaged in a countries of the world guessing game until they both fell asleep about midway through the four-hour trip back to Acadiana.
They ended up awakening once at Aunt J's home and did not finally go back to sleep until about 2am Sunday.
By Sunday at 11am, they were still asleep !
The children and their mother, the penultimate sibling among eight, will try to visit New Orleans and brother J and friend L, this week, along with seeing Dad and other friends in Crowley.
FrAussie Mom said she will rent a car to make her visiting easier.
Friday, November 11, 2005
A Day with Dad
Today was one of those rare days spent mostly with Dad, and I cherished it.
Dad (as most of you know him) was in fine form - his acerbic wit slashed left and right, crossing all boundaries of political correctness - with a huge dose of fatalistic self-pity thrown in for good measure - in other words - typical Dad.
"I aint interested in any of these 'lifetime guarantees' people mention to me," he grumbled at one point. He's 80.
His funniest story was of his visit to a local grocery store. Since the hurricane hit, he gets some help with special food coupons, but they can only be spent for human food (no alcohol, no tobacco, etc). But he loves his three cats ("I would have 12 if I could, and build 'em a big cathouse in the back yard"), and so tried to purchase some salmon cat food for them.
The clerk would have none of it. "Sorry sir," he said she told him. "You cannot purchase pet food with these special food coupons, only human food."
"But these are my favorite - I eat these - this has been part of my diet for a long time" he said he told her - to no avail. Just like Dad - trying to slip something past someone in authority. And he wonders where we get that streak of anti-authoritarian behavior from time to time.
My favorite part of the visit was our tour around town in his truck. After he sat in the front passenger seat, he put on a big white straw cowboy hat that he had in the back jumpseat of his truck, and the sudden sight of him wearing it caught me by surprise and I laughed out loud.
He didn't even change expression as I laughed so hard I could not drive. In his 80 years he has NEVER possessed even one molecule in a cowboy bent - but he wore that hat as I chauffeured him around. He actually looked fine in it.
"Moe gave me this hat, and I like it," he stated simply, refering to a son-in-law. I am still smiling at the sight of Dad in a cowboy hat (a big one). Made him look like a father of a member of the Village People. Thanks for that laugh, Moe.
During our ride he showed me the new ballparks out at the Recreation Center Area on Standard Mill Road in southwest part of town. It's a phenomenal sight - all those new ballparks for the children of our hometown to enjoy.
I even rode by the park where I played Little League (under his coaching tutelage) and saw a baseball laying in the grass near home plate. I retrieved it and then stood on the same exact mound where I stood 41, 42, 43, 44, and 45 years ago and pitched.
Then I walked over to the shortstop area, where I played when I was not pitching. I got a bit of that old feeling inside for a moment. It felt great - and I felt myself checking my position relative to third base and second base - just as I did those many years ago.
Those were some of my glory years and part of Dad's as well : he coached so many pennant winners that there was a collective sigh of relief from the other coaches when he retired from coaching our hometown boys - which he did for more than 20 years.
He commented on the people in the cemetery. "I just want my ashes put in some garden, mixed up with good compost," he said. He recently donated his body to science, so he may ultimately get his wish.
"Your brother the chef just started a new job at Old Time Cafe," Dad informed me. "It's the best place to get a plate lunch these days in this town," he said.
We then tried to find a childhood friend of mine that once lived across the street from our home, and we did not guess (but found out later) that he'd moved, along with his 87-year old mother, to a home just behind the Methodist Church, on 4th Street. I made a mental note to visit E.W. and mom R.W. later.
We went by Dad's former business location on the west side of town. You could still clearly see his name on the sign out front, although the present owners tried to paint over it. Dad said it was about to become a church hall.
Each time we passed a home where someone he knew once lived but has now died, he mentioned that fact. "Heck almost nobody I knew 52 years ago when I moved here is still alive," he mused. I tried to change the subject.
He also pointed out homes that used to house a certain family - sometimes over several generations - but has now been sold to a new family - and I found this unsettling, as these homes always meant "so and so's family lives here" to me - and now that is no longer true.
In only one neighborhood did we run into someone we both knew - a contemporary of my father and mother's whose husband was our pharmacist - she was out working in her garden and looked almost exactly the same to me - even 40 years after I had seen her on a regular basis.
She and her husband had five children - all the ages of one of us (we are eight children), and she briefly caught us up on them. She also said that her husband just loves the internet and spends hours on it every day, mostly writing stinging letters about something or the other to the local paper. Dad emphatically told her that he will not go near a computer.
Remarkably - she asked him if he still fixed TVs because she had one that needed fixing. Dad told her that she could buy a new one for just a little more than what it would cost to fix that old one.
We commented on other homes that were damaged in the recent hurricanes and how strange it was to him that one home would be damaged and the ones on either side would be unscathed. He shook his head and put his hand over his mouth - one of his habits learned from his mother Fanny Ella.
"There's TWO reasons I am even still alive," he mused. "One is the good genes from my mother (she lived to be 90), and the other is that I exercised most of my life (not only was Dad a professional baseball player, but also , he ran miles and miles around the NDHS track and then rode a stationary bike well into his 60s)."
I had to agree with him there. His own father died at 68, and at 80, Dad is by far the longest-lived male in the family line.
Gives me hope.
In fact, the whole visit gave me hope. Especially the part back at the house where Dad showed off how affectionate his adopted Cat "Charley One Nut" could be. Sure enough, that cat nuzzled Dad as if Dad were his actual father, and it warmed me inside to see Dad enjoy this show of affection from this cat.
I left when my baby sister came by to retrieve me, but not without nuzzling Dad myself. He reached up and grabbed my head as I buried it in his neck. "Come back and visit again soon," he mumbled.
I know I will.
Dad (as most of you know him) was in fine form - his acerbic wit slashed left and right, crossing all boundaries of political correctness - with a huge dose of fatalistic self-pity thrown in for good measure - in other words - typical Dad.
"I aint interested in any of these 'lifetime guarantees' people mention to me," he grumbled at one point. He's 80.
His funniest story was of his visit to a local grocery store. Since the hurricane hit, he gets some help with special food coupons, but they can only be spent for human food (no alcohol, no tobacco, etc). But he loves his three cats ("I would have 12 if I could, and build 'em a big cathouse in the back yard"), and so tried to purchase some salmon cat food for them.
The clerk would have none of it. "Sorry sir," he said she told him. "You cannot purchase pet food with these special food coupons, only human food."
"But these are my favorite - I eat these - this has been part of my diet for a long time" he said he told her - to no avail. Just like Dad - trying to slip something past someone in authority. And he wonders where we get that streak of anti-authoritarian behavior from time to time.
My favorite part of the visit was our tour around town in his truck. After he sat in the front passenger seat, he put on a big white straw cowboy hat that he had in the back jumpseat of his truck, and the sudden sight of him wearing it caught me by surprise and I laughed out loud.
He didn't even change expression as I laughed so hard I could not drive. In his 80 years he has NEVER possessed even one molecule in a cowboy bent - but he wore that hat as I chauffeured him around. He actually looked fine in it.
"Moe gave me this hat, and I like it," he stated simply, refering to a son-in-law. I am still smiling at the sight of Dad in a cowboy hat (a big one). Made him look like a father of a member of the Village People. Thanks for that laugh, Moe.
During our ride he showed me the new ballparks out at the Recreation Center Area on Standard Mill Road in southwest part of town. It's a phenomenal sight - all those new ballparks for the children of our hometown to enjoy.
I even rode by the park where I played Little League (under his coaching tutelage) and saw a baseball laying in the grass near home plate. I retrieved it and then stood on the same exact mound where I stood 41, 42, 43, 44, and 45 years ago and pitched.
Then I walked over to the shortstop area, where I played when I was not pitching. I got a bit of that old feeling inside for a moment. It felt great - and I felt myself checking my position relative to third base and second base - just as I did those many years ago.
Those were some of my glory years and part of Dad's as well : he coached so many pennant winners that there was a collective sigh of relief from the other coaches when he retired from coaching our hometown boys - which he did for more than 20 years.
He commented on the people in the cemetery. "I just want my ashes put in some garden, mixed up with good compost," he said. He recently donated his body to science, so he may ultimately get his wish.
"Your brother the chef just started a new job at Old Time Cafe," Dad informed me. "It's the best place to get a plate lunch these days in this town," he said.
We then tried to find a childhood friend of mine that once lived across the street from our home, and we did not guess (but found out later) that he'd moved, along with his 87-year old mother, to a home just behind the Methodist Church, on 4th Street. I made a mental note to visit E.W. and mom R.W. later.
We went by Dad's former business location on the west side of town. You could still clearly see his name on the sign out front, although the present owners tried to paint over it. Dad said it was about to become a church hall.
Each time we passed a home where someone he knew once lived but has now died, he mentioned that fact. "Heck almost nobody I knew 52 years ago when I moved here is still alive," he mused. I tried to change the subject.
He also pointed out homes that used to house a certain family - sometimes over several generations - but has now been sold to a new family - and I found this unsettling, as these homes always meant "so and so's family lives here" to me - and now that is no longer true.
In only one neighborhood did we run into someone we both knew - a contemporary of my father and mother's whose husband was our pharmacist - she was out working in her garden and looked almost exactly the same to me - even 40 years after I had seen her on a regular basis.
She and her husband had five children - all the ages of one of us (we are eight children), and she briefly caught us up on them. She also said that her husband just loves the internet and spends hours on it every day, mostly writing stinging letters about something or the other to the local paper. Dad emphatically told her that he will not go near a computer.
Remarkably - she asked him if he still fixed TVs because she had one that needed fixing. Dad told her that she could buy a new one for just a little more than what it would cost to fix that old one.
We commented on other homes that were damaged in the recent hurricanes and how strange it was to him that one home would be damaged and the ones on either side would be unscathed. He shook his head and put his hand over his mouth - one of his habits learned from his mother Fanny Ella.
"There's TWO reasons I am even still alive," he mused. "One is the good genes from my mother (she lived to be 90), and the other is that I exercised most of my life (not only was Dad a professional baseball player, but also , he ran miles and miles around the NDHS track and then rode a stationary bike well into his 60s)."
I had to agree with him there. His own father died at 68, and at 80, Dad is by far the longest-lived male in the family line.
Gives me hope.
In fact, the whole visit gave me hope. Especially the part back at the house where Dad showed off how affectionate his adopted Cat "Charley One Nut" could be. Sure enough, that cat nuzzled Dad as if Dad were his actual father, and it warmed me inside to see Dad enjoy this show of affection from this cat.
I left when my baby sister came by to retrieve me, but not without nuzzling Dad myself. He reached up and grabbed my head as I buried it in his neck. "Come back and visit again soon," he mumbled.
I know I will.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Happy Birthday Christopher Paris
Happy Birthday to the Best Boy in the Whole World
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
(Count the exclamation points )
I miss you and hope to see you soon !
I love you more than there are tiny water droplets on a foggy morning !
Your Dad - Joseph
I miss you and hope to see you soon !
I love you more than there are tiny water droplets on a foggy morning !
Your Dad - Joseph
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